Kilg.us – Fantasy Stat Tracker …Tracker

Tomorrow morning Kilg.us will use a entirely new process for generating and sending daily boxscore emails! So let’s all cross our fingers and hope it works…

I have spent all of this week re-designing and re-building how emails are generated, stored, and sent. Suffice to say, the new system is significantly more complex than the old one. When I’ve had a chance to breath and am not so tired, I’ll go into more detail on how it works.

My expectations of the new system are that it will:

• Scale to accommodate as many users/emails as desired (the old system failed in the 200-300 range)
• Allow of future portability if Kilg.us needs to change hosting
• Implement all components to identify HTML vs. Text email so boxscores render properly on all clients
• Allow for side-by-side HTML and Text versions (text version is forthcoming)
• Provide redundancy of data, so if the process fails it can be re-started without losing a day’s data
• Reduce likelihood of Kilg.us mail servers being identified as SPAM and black-listed
• Lower computation overhead

It sounds almost too good to be true! Tomorrow’s push will be the first full run trying to send out to everyone’s unique addresses. All the testing so far has been delivering to a kilg.us address (or small tests to outside domains). I’ll be keeping an eye on things in the morning to try to ensure everything goes smoothly. If you do not receive your normal boxscore in an acceptably legible format, please post comments here with details (DETAILS–without them I can’t do anything–what email client, what team name, what was wrong, screenshots, any little detail).

Welcome to the new release of Kilg.us  for the 2010 season! Most noticeable is a completely re-vamped visual theme. This theme will be ported over to the Kilg.us Tracker …Tracker in the coming days, but for now it just lives on Kilg.us.

Kilg.us home page

Other 2010 additions include:

• the industry friends search now utilizes Lucene for search intelligence
• drag-and-drop players to and from your bench
• the Zend framework is installed on the server and being used at various places on the site
• the sign-up and log-in forms have been combined to offer a quicker, easier experience
• you can select from a series of major league ballpark  images for your background
• new user accounts default to a “public” state so everyone can find their friends when they sign-up
• invite as many of your friends at once as you’d like
• Kilg.us …Tracker updates pulled directly into your Dashboard

Each of these additions will be described in more detail in future posts. For now, please log-in, poke around, and enjoy the new Kilg.us!

As always, if you encounter problems, email me or comment on an appropriate post.

Tomorrow (3/17) evening I plan to launch the 2010 updates for Kilg.us. Launch will probably commence around 10pm Mountain time. The launch will replace the entire Kilg.us code base with a new iteration. This will likely result in at least a few minutes–and as much as a few hours–of downtime.

I will blog and tweet (@kilgusTracker) updates to announce when the launch is completed.

In addition to the Kilg.us updates, I will be publishing a series of blog posts to describe the changes and how to use the new features of Kilg.us. For current users, you will find the interaction mechanisms to be very familiar. A new visual style is the most disruptive change. As the season progresses I’ll be getting back to refining the functionality of the tool

I’m in the process of implementing a series of updates to Kilg.us for the 2010 season. The biggest noticeable difference will be an entire new look and feel. The new layout will allow for 1, 2, and 3-column pages that should let Kilg.us more efficiently use space.

Other changes in progress include:

• Integrated log-in/sign-up function
• User-defined backgrounds
• More flexibility in the “invite friends” functionality
• Updated log-in flow
• Drag-and-drop bench
• Integration with Zend framework

Among the other items I’m planning to get to before opening day:

• Add OPS to statistics available for tracking
• Implement Lucene search for “Find Friends”
• SSL for log-in flow

If you have other suggestions, please add a comment or drop me a long at admin@kilg.us

I’ll go into more detail about the updated features over the coming weeks. In the mean time, I’m just trying to get things done before the season kicks-off!

Finally, after months of development (also known as “inactivity”), Kilg.us now has a mobile-optimized verion: m.kilg.us! Currently Kilg.us Mobile only allows for tracking of stats–no account or team management. With a very simple interface you can log-in, view your dashboard–complete with summary stats for all teams, and track the stats of all your fantasy teams and players.

I currently only have an iPhone, so that is what the site is optimized for. If you have a Pre, Blackberry, or Android phone I would appreciate any feedback and screenshots you can send me of how the site is rendering and performing.

The interface is still undergoing some tweaking, but it is very minor and should not impact the current functionality. After I get a feel for how the mobile version of Kilg.us is performing, I’ll start to plan out the addition of more functionality. I’m not sure if the mobile site will ever be feature-complete, but I expect it will be moving in that direction.

Luckily the object-oriented architecture of Kilg.us made the mobile site painless to implement. I would guess it’s been less than 8 hours in development and most of that time has gone into fine-tuning the interface. Hopefully future additional functionality will be as simple to add!

It is now possible to change the order in which your Kilg.us Industry teams display on your Dashboard and team-selection drop-down menu. Both displays use the same ordering. To change the order, click the “Select teams to Display” link from the “My Industry” section of your dashboard. This will open a page that lists all the teams your Industry friends have exposed for you to view. In addition to selecting to show or hide the teams, you can drag-and-drop to change the order of list. After making all the show/hide and ordering changes, click the “Save Display Selections” button to save your changes.

For a team to be visible on your Dashboard and team-selection drop-down, they must have the “Show” option selected. All teams (whether shown or not) can be re-ordered on the page, but only teams marked to Show will be visible to you elsewhere in Kilg.us.

The new drag-and-drop functionality is done using a JQuery plug-in–TableDnD. It should work across all modern browsers, but if you have any difficulty with it, please let me know.

In other developments, I tweaked the display of the Find Users page to utilize avatars and look more like the Owners list on the Dashboard. Doing so removed the “+” that used to be the activator to request an Owner join your Industry. You can now click anywhere (their avatar, name, email, etc.) on the Owner to make the request. There is still a confirmation dialog before the request is actually make so you won’t accidentally add people you don’t know to your Industry.

I also did some tuning to the logic behind the process of requesting Owners to join your Industry and the acceptance/denial flow thereafter.

Lastly, some style tweaks for all elements that use avatars and contain links. To identify hover-states, those elements will now display a gray border. The style uses the border-radius attributes from CSS3 that Webkit (Safari, Chrome) and Firefox make available. Those of you using less capable browsers (ie, IE) will have to suffer through square corners on your borders.

Today has seen substantial progress on the iPhone web app version of Kilg.us. It now allows Users to log-in, create teams, and access a Team page. As of right now, no information other than the team name is displayed on the Team page, but it’s progress. So far I’ve had to duplicate most of the log-in and user session authentication files, but both apps are sharing the same objects for teams and players.  It’s not where I would like to be, but it’s better than nothing.

I started work on an icon set for the button navigation of the mobile site. It is further evidence that I’m not a designer, but all things considered, I’m pretty pleased with them so far.

A few days ago I implemented the Dashboard discussed in the previous post. It still doesn’t do anything but provide access to all of a User’s team pages.

As you have certainly noticed, I am finally applying a unique theme to the Fantasy Baseball Stat Tracker blog. The theme is nearly identical to the Fantasy Baseball Stat Tracker with a few additions as needed to handle blog-specific elements. The biggest variation from the Stat Tracker is the 2-column layout using a wide left column and thin right column. I don’t have any intention of re-using this layout elsewhere, but at least I’ll knows it’s available should I need it.

One other minor change: the title. You’ll notice the blog is now named the “Fantasy Stat Tracker …Tracker” rather than just the “Fantasy Stat Tracker.” Not a big deal but I thought I’d toss it out there.

Please bare with me as I work on the blog styling. I’ll try not to destroy any of the functionality as I work, but this is my first time styling a WordPress blog, so who knows what could happen.

Another day, another FTP issue. Again limited to the functionality (and horrible usability) of the hosting provider’s File Manager, I focused primarily on visual design and style. I’m not enthralled with my current design, but at least it’s some progress. I spent a few hours working in Photoshop today creating visual elements then writing out the stylesheet.

With all my development projects I start my styling by writing as close to the W3C standard as possible and using Firefox (with Firebug) for testing. Down the line, I’ll flush out the styles to ensure compatibility with IE7, Safari, and Konqueror. At this point, IE6 has brought my life so much stress and turmoil that I have no intention of supporting it.

Tomorrow won’t offer much time for development on the Fantasy Stat Tracker, so I’ll probably continue to work on minor visual elements. The next functionality development tasks will include creating user accounts and teams and editing those items. Hopefully that will be in place before the end of the weekend.